Code

I read about 25 books this year, here are the top 10 I look forward to reading in 2020, many of them informed by my favorites of 2019: Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari - I read Sapiens this year and really enjoyed it. I just started this today one so I may finish that before the end of the year. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - I like books that make me think and from what I've heard, this will definitely do the trick. I read Factfulness this year and this was a suggested follow-up. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker - I've gotten really into natural languages since I've lived outside my country of origin for the last 2 and a half years and I've heard good things about this book being an entry point into linguistics. Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski - With the new Witcher show coming out on Netflix I finally went back and beat The Witcher 3 then read the first book, The Last Wish. It was enjoyable enough that I want to keep going with the series. Educated by Tara Westover - Was convinced by Bill Gate's blog this is worthwhile. I'm a teacher so it wasn't hard to convince me.…

- The Road to Character (David Brooks) - Code (Charles Petzold) - Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual (John Z. Sonmez) - Zero Bugs and Program Faster (Kate Thompson) - Daemon (Daniel Suarez) - Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (Brian Christian) - How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships (Leil Lowndes)

- The Practice of Programming ; Kernighan and Pike - The Advent of the Algorithm ; Berlinski - Engineering a Compiler ; Torczon and Cooper - Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment ; Stevens and Rago - Databases, Types, and the Relational Model ; Date - Code ; Petzold

Any book written by Charles Petzold is an enjoyable read, though particularly the non-MS specific titles Code and The Annotated Turing. Java Concurrency in Practice (2006) is older but relevant and clearly describes concurrency on the JVM. A must read for any Java, Scala, Clojure, etc. software engineer; well-written, enjoyable, concise. Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz is a fun read packed with good principles for working in Ruby that are applicable in general to object oriented programming. Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck is worth a read because the general principles are applicable to any OOP language. Clean Code by Robert Martin is excellent but a time commitment. (If you had to pick between SICP and Clean Code because time is at a premium I'd err on the side of Clean Code for practicality. Writing maintainable code is paramount.) The Joy of Clojure (Fogus/Houser) is excellent and mentally digestable even if you have no Lisp or Clojure background.